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Israel Expands Its Bombardment in Lebanon as Tens of Thousands Flee

Smoke billows amid the ongoing hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, as seen from Tyre, southern Lebanon October 5, 2024. (Reuters)
Smoke billows amid the ongoing hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, as seen from Tyre, southern Lebanon October 5, 2024. (Reuters)
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Israel Expands Its Bombardment in Lebanon as Tens of Thousands Flee

Smoke billows amid the ongoing hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, as seen from Tyre, southern Lebanon October 5, 2024. (Reuters)
Smoke billows amid the ongoing hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, as seen from Tyre, southern Lebanon October 5, 2024. (Reuters)

Israel expanded its bombardment in Lebanon on Saturday, hitting Beirut’s southern suburbs with a dozen airstrikes and striking a Palestinian refugee camp deep in the north for the first time as it targeted both Hezbollah and Hamas fighters.

Tens of thousands of people in Lebanon, including Palestinian refugees, continued to flee the widening conflict in the region, while rallies were held around the world marking the approaching anniversary of the start of the war in Gaza.

Israel's attack on the Beddawi camp near Lebanon's northern city of Tripoli killed an official with Hamas’ military wing along with his wife and two young daughters, the Palestinian armed group said. Hamas later said another military wing member was killed in an Israeli strike in Lebanon’s eastern Bekaa Valley.

Israel’s military said it killed two senior officials with Hamas’ military wing in Lebanon, where fighting has escalated in recent weeks. Israel has killed several Hamas officials there since the Israel-Hamas war began, in addition to most of the top leadership of the Lebanon-based Hezbollah.

At least 1,400 Lebanese, also including civilians and paramedics, have been killed and 1.2 million driven from homes in less than two weeks.

Plumes of smoke dominated the skyline over Beirut’s densely populated southern suburbs, where Hezbollah has a strong presence. Israel says it is targeting Hezbollah commanders and military equipment and aims to drive the group away from shared borders.

The Iranian-backed Hezbollah, the strongest armed force in Lebanon, began firing rockets into Israel almost immediately after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, calling it a show of support for the Palestinians. Hezbollah and Israel's military have traded fire almost daily.

Last week, Israel launched what it called a limited ground operation into southern Lebanon after a series of attacks killed longtime Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and others. Nine Israeli soldiers have been killed in the intense ground clashes that Israel says have killed 250 Hezbollah fighters. The fighting is the worst since Israel and Hezbollah fought a brief war in 2006.

Israel's military on Saturday said about 90 projectiles were fired from Lebanon into Israeli territory. Most were intercepted, but several fell in the northern Arab town of Deir al-Asad, where police said three people were lightly injured.

Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, told reporters in Damascus that “we are trying to reach a ceasefire in Gaza and in Lebanon.” The minister did not name the countries putting forward initiatives, saying they include regional states and some outside the Middle East.

Araghchi spoke a day after the supreme leader of Iran praised its recent missile strikes on Israel and said it was ready to do it again if necessary.

Fleeing Lebanon on foot At least six people were killed in more than a dozen Israeli airstrikes overnight and into Saturday, according to the National News Agency, a Lebanese state-run new outlet.

Nearly 375,000 people have crossed from Lebanon into Syria, fleeing Israeli strikes, in less than two weeks, according to a Lebanese government committee.

Associated Press journalists saw thousands of people continuing to cross the Masnaa Border Crossing on foot, crunching over the rubble after Israeli airstrikes left huge craters in the road leading to it on Thursday. Much of Hezbollah’s weaponry is believed to come from Iran through Syria.

Other displaced families now shelter alongside Beirut’s famous seaside Corniche, their wind-flapped tents just steps from luxury homes. “We don’t care if we die, but we don’t want to die at the hands of Netanyahu,” said Om Ali Mcheik.

The Israeli military said special forces were carrying out targeted ground raids against Hezbollah infrastructure in southern Lebanon, destroying missiles, launchpads and weapons storage facilities. It said troops dismantled tunnel shafts that Hezbollah used to approach the Israeli border.

More evacuation orders in Gaza Almost 42,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza during the war, according to the Health Ministry there, which does not differentiate between civilian and fighter deaths. Almost 90% of Gaza’s residents are now displaced, amid widespread destruction.

Palestinian medical officials said Israeli strikes in northern and central Gaza on Saturday killed at least nine people.

One in the northern town of Beit Hanoun killed at least five people, including two children, according to Gaza's Health Ministry. Another hit a house in the Nuseirat refugee camp, killing at least four, the Awda hospital said.

The Israeli military did not have any immediate comment but has long accused Hamas of operating from within civilian areas.

An Israeli airstrike killed two children in Gaza City’s Zaytoun neighborhood, according to the civil defense first responders’ group that operates under the Hamas-run government.

Israel's military warned Palestinians to evacuate along the strategic Netzarim corridor in central Gaza, which was at the heart of obstacles to a ceasefire deal. The military told people in parts of the Nuseirat and Bureij refugee camps to evacuate to Muwasi, a coastal area it has designated a humanitarian zone.

It’s unclear how many Palestinians are in the areas ordered evacuated. Israeli forces have often returned to areas in Gaza to target Hamas fighters as they regroup.

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Arab World

As Flooding Becomes a Yearly Disaster in South Sudan, Thousands Survive on the Edge of a Canal

Children ride in a small canoe around the area where they live in Jonglei state, South Sudan. (Photo: AP)
Children ride in a small canoe around the area where they live in Jonglei state, South Sudan. (Photo: AP)
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As Flooding Becomes a Yearly Disaster in South Sudan, Thousands Survive on the Edge of a Canal

Children ride in a small canoe around the area where they live in Jonglei state, South Sudan. (Photo: AP)
Children ride in a small canoe around the area where they live in Jonglei state, South Sudan. (Photo: AP)

Long-horned cattle wade through flooded lands and climb a slope along a canal that has become a refuge for displaced families in South Sudan. Smoke from burning dung rises near homes of mud and grass where thousands of people now live after floods swept away their village.
“Too much suffering,” said Bichiok Hoth Chuiny, a woman in her 70s. She supported herself with a stick as she walked in the newly established community of Pajiek in Jonglei state north of the capital, Juba, The Associated Press said.
For the first time in decades, the flooding had forced her to flee. Her efforts to protect her home by building dykes failed. Her former village of Gorwai is now a swamp.
“I had to be dragged in a canoe up to here,” Chuiny said. An AP journalist was the first to visit the community.
Such flooding is becoming a yearly disaster in South Sudan, which the World Bank has described as “the world’s most vulnerable country to climate change and also the one most lacking in coping capacity."
More than 379,000 people have been displaced by flooding this year, according to the UN humanitarian agency.
Seasonal flooding has long been part of the lifestyle of pastoral communities around the Sudd, the largest wetlands in Africa, in the Nile River floodplain. But since the 1960s the swamp has kept growing, submerging villages, ruining farmland and killing livestock.
“The Dinka, Nuer and Murle communities of Jonglei are losing the ability to keep cattle and do farming in that region the way they used to,” said Daniel Akech Thiong, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group.
South Sudan is poorly equipped to adjust. Independent since 2011, the country plunged into civil war in 2013. Despite a peace deal in 2018, the government has failed to address numerous crises. Some 2.4 million people remain internally displaced by conflict and flooding.
The latest overflowing of the Nile has been blamed on factors including the opening of dams upstream in Uganda after Lake Victoria rose to its highest levels in five years.
The century-old Jonglei Canal, which was never completed, has become a refuge for many.
“We don’t know up to where this flooding would have pushed us if the canal was not there,” said Peter Kuach Gatchang, the paramount chief of Pajiek. He was already raising a small garden of pumpkins and eggplants in his new home.
The 340-kilometer (211-mile) Jonglei Canal was first imagined in the early 1900s by Anglo-Egyptian colonial authorities to increase the Nile’s outflow towards Egypt in the north. But its development was interrupted by the long fight of southern Sudanese against the Sudanese regime in Khartoum that eventually led to the creation of a separate country.
Gatchang said the new community in Pajiek is neglected: "We have no school and no clinic here, and if you stay for a few days, you will see us carrying our patients on stretchers up to Ayod town.”
Ayod, the county headquarters, is reached by a six-hour walk through the waist-high water.
Pajiek also has no mobile network and no government presence. The area is under the control of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-in-Opposition, founded by President Salva Kiir’s rival turned Vice President Riek Machar.
Villagers rely on aid. On a recent day, hundreds of women lined up in a nearby field to receive some from the World Food Program.
Nyabuot Reat Kuor walked home with a 50-kilogram (110-pound) bag of sorghum balanced on her head.
“This flooding has destroyed our farm, killed our livestock and displaced us for good," the mother of eight said. “Our old village of Gorwai has become a river.”
When food assistance runs out, she said, they will survive on wild leaves and water lilies from the swamp. Already in recent years, food aid rations have been cut in half as international funding for such crises drops.
More than 69,000 people who have migrated to the Jonglei Canal in Ayod county are registered for food assistance, according to WFP.
“There are no passable roads at this time of the year, and the canal is too low to support boats carrying a lot of food,” said John Kimemia, a WFP airdrop coordinator.
In the neighboring Paguong village that is surrounded by flooded lands, the health center has few supplies. Medics haven’t been paid since June due to an economic crisis that has seen civil servants nationwide go unpaid for more than a year.
South Sudan’s economic woes have deepened with the disruption of oil exports after a major pipeline was damaged in Sudan during that country's ongoing civil war.
“The last time we got drugs was in September. We mobilized the women to carry them on foot from Ayod town,” said Juong Dok Tut, a clinical officer.
Patients, mostly women and children, sat on the ground as they waited to see the doctor. Panic rippled through the group when a thin green snake passed among them. It wasn't poisonous, but many others in the area are. People who venture into the water to fish or collect water lilies are at risk.
Four life-threatening snake bites cases occurred in October, Tut said. “We managed these cases with the antivenom treatments we had, but now they’re over, so we don’t know what to do if it happens again.”